The laptop thing is heating up at many

campuses.  Each morning, in UD‘s email,

Google News has sent two or three new

opinion pieces, articles, letters, from

either side of the controversy.  It’s not

just occasional professors who ban

anymore – it’s entire schools, like

University of Chicago law.

In most classrooms, laptops, and their BFFs,

cell phones and iPods, are an ongoing debacle.

[T]here is a way to appease both sides here. Some schools have classrooms where the Internet connection in the entire room can be turned on or off with the flip of a switch. This is a great way to compromise between professors and students. Students can bring their laptops so they can type up notes, but they are unable to get online unless the professor decides it would be beneficial to the class.

A student at UD‘s George Washington University makes a good case against classroom laptops. She offers the above as a solution, but UD could swear she read somewhere (she can’t find it now) that there are many ways for students to disable the off switch.

… [O]nline education doesn’t translate into better learning outcomes, said respondents in [a] faculty survey. More than 10,000 faculty members at 67 public campuses responded to the survey.

While 30 percent of faculty members surveyed felt that online courses provided superior or equivalent learning outcomes when compared with face-to-face classes, 70 percent felt that learning outcomes were inferior…

Chronicle of Higher Ed

Surfing the Web may soon disappear entirely from Georgetown [University] classrooms, as a growing number of professors enact policies either banning or discouraging laptop use during lectures and discussion sections.

For David Goldfrank, a professor in the department of history, the turning point came at the beginning of a World History II discussion section in 2007.

“I started with a directed question, and the student replied, ‘Wait a minute, please. I need to turn on my computer where I have my notes,’” Goldfrank said. “[ … As a professor,] I don’t want to know what is in your computer; I want to know what is in your head.”

… [Professor David] Cole claims that students who use their computers to take notes become stenographers rather than actually processing the information, and those who are surfing the Internet are simply not engaged.

… “I don’t have much self-control,” Cristina Cardenal (COL ’11) said. “When there’s a lull in conversation and I have my laptop … I want to go on the Internet.”

… “The few advantages, such as a student’s targeted looking up a disputed or unfamiliar fact during a lecture, could not come close to balancing the negatives,” Goldfrank said…

Technology can do much more than enable a woman with six children to have another eight.

Here at University Diaries, we tend to follow the amazing things classroom technology can do.

A student at Yale expresses his gratitude.

I’m willing to say that it’s a fact: Every day at Yale, someone’s cell phone goes off during class. That’s fine, it happens to all of us at some point. What boggles my mind is that nine times out of 10, the person a) has their cell phone in their bag, rather than perhaps in a pocket, thus putting it further out of reach, b) takes the phone out of their bag while it’s still ringing, or c) blankly stares at it, as if just too curious to avoid checking who’s calling at that moment. And all the while it is emitting that annoying Nokia descending ringtone even louder now because it’s not being suppressed by the bag, distracting just about everyone in class for upwards of 30 seconds, and deeply, deeply frustrating your humble correspondent. I mean, for God’s sake.

I understand the recent argument in the [Yale Daily] News that laptops should be banned from class. I’ll admit it; I take notes on my laptop sometimes, but only in classes in which I permit myself to be distracted, i.e. ones that I don’t care that much about. Not exactly the ideal student ethic, but certainly practical for the easily bored college student of the 21st century.

Overall, I somehow find it hard to imagine that most technological aids in the classroom truly take learning to new levels, somehow bestow Yale students with a far more profound understanding of the arts and sciences. Professors often use Powerpoint presentations that are completely worthless or simply jarring, that often pose more problems than they’re worth. Video clips in slides never open. Ever. They just bring up a picture of the Quicktime icon and leave the professor struggling to find the program on his or her desktop that is, meanwhile, projected to the whole class, who are all the while scanning it for anything moderately incriminating or embarrassing.

Transition effects like text (typically WordArt) bouncing like a basketball or shattering like glass, often paired with sound effects such as “ca-CHING” or “ahhhOOOOOgaaah” fail to grip the average Yale student, I think it’s safe to say. Students often download the Powerpoint presentation of a given lecture before class, taking notes on it while following along on their computers. This is like three steps away from the actual content of the lecture, each step making the student that much more passive and the professor that much more distant.

Nobody needs a slide in an introductory lecture that says “Introduction.” Nobody.

We don’t really need the expensive Smartboards in LC to learn about “Paradise Lost” or African-American history. We need the knowledge, and the newest gadgets don’t automatically deliver it any better or any faster, despite tech specs that may claim otherwise. If one were to add up all the minutes used in lectures over the course of a semester spent fiddling with, fixing and adjusting technological classroom aids, one would undoubtedly find that we lose a heck of a lot of valuable learning time. Ultimately, these innovations distract us, best intentions aside. Why do we use them? Well, because we can.

Take Mr. O’Callaghan, a hometown friend’s seventh-grade pre-algebra teacher. Word on the street was that he would look at porn on the Internet while students took tests. My friend didn’t believe it until he saw it with his own eyes. But hey, if the technology’s there, he might as well use it, right?

Mr. O’Callaghan seems to have moved on from junior high to the National Science Foundation…

UD‘s struck by the circularity of history…. From early man cranking his shank in a cave to Mr. O’Callaghan in his cubicle at the NSF…

From today’s Yale Daily News.

Facebook stalking in class is no longer an option for a growing number of Yale students.

In an attempt to encourage students to pay attention to lectures and to facilitate class discussions, at least two dozen professors and teaching assistants have banned, or at least discouraged, laptop use since classrooms were outfitted with wireless in 2006. Despite the inconvenience the policy poses of taking notes by hand [God yes. The whole taking notes by hand thing. It’s like not having a dishwasher.], many of the professors said in interviews that they have not received any complaints about their no-laptops policies, and a handful of them even said they received positive feedback.

It’s no secret that students using laptops often multi-task in class — answering e-mails, instant messaging, reading the news and occasionally even taking notes.

… Five professors interviewed said laptops put up a literal barrier between students and the professor, hampering discussions and a sense of community within the classroom.

“I want to interact with the students. I want them to be paying attention,” said political science and religious studies professor Andrew March, who banned laptops from his Spring 2008 seminar, “Islamic Political Thought.” “It is impossible, even with the best intentions, to stay off e-mail, the Internet, Solitaire.”

… English and political science lecturer Mark Oppenheimer ’96 GRD ’03, who is teaching “Classics of Political Journalism” this semester, said his policy against laptops is no different from any other classroom regulation a professor might have — such as no swearing and timeliness.

In discussion sections, laptops also make it difficult to read the teaching fellows’ or other students’ body language, said Robin Morris GRD ’11, a TF for “Terrorism in America 1865-2001” this semester.

“By looking at students’ faces during discussion, I can look for signs of confusion, disagreement, boredom, excitement — all signals that help me determine my next move in the classroom,” she said. [Why not trash all of online learning! Hasn’t this woman heard that faceless technology’s sweeping the nation? The Atlanta Journal Constitution quotes a distance educator who tells her students “Give me a smiley if you get it.“]

Taking notes by hand not only eliminates the noise of typing — often distracting in a small seminar — but also forces students to filter information, instead of passively taking notes verbatim, Oppenheimer added.

School of Forestry and Environmental Studies professor Shimon Anisfeld, who banned laptop use from his two courses this spring, “Water Resource Management” and “Organic Pollutants in the Environment,” even used a comic strip to illustrate his point that laptop use takes away from the atmosphere of the classroom. The strip, which Anisfield showed his class the first day, depicts a student having an online conversation in class — a humorous exaggeration of the consequences of classroom laptop use. [UD‘s gotta admit that if she found herself in Organic Pollutants she might seek some form of relief … I mean, Water Resource Management, okay, sounds riveting… But Organic Pollutants might pose a problem… ]

Since enacting the policy, professors said they have seen levels of classroom interaction and grades improve.

“I have seen marvelous results,” March said. “I was ambivalent at the beginning, but I would never go back to allowing laptops.”

And at least some students are warming up to the idea, too.

In his course evaluations for “Eastern Europe Since 1914” in Fall 2007, history professor Timothy Snyder asked students how they felt about his policy on laptops. He received unanimously positive responses. One student even asked why more Yale classes don’t enact a ban, he recalled.

Leadeth me beside
the submerged school desk.

… One of the ads for the Kaplan, Inc. division (and subsidiary of The Washington Post Co.) is a 60-second commercial depicting a professor at a lectern before his students. The professor apologizes, saying “The system has failed you; I have failed you” because higher education, “is steeped in tradition and old ideas.” As he argues that it is time to use technology to “rewrite the rules of education,” the camera cuts to different people in different locations watching his speech from laptops and mobile digital players.

A second commercial shows a series of video shots of school desks arrayed in odd locations, like a beach, submerged in a river, in subway cars, and in supermarket aisles. A college-guy voiceover says “Where is it written that the old way is the right way? Where is it written that a traditional education is the only way to get an education, that classes only take place in a classroom?” …